The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. In order to provide easier or faster information transfer and convenience, telecommunication industry service providers are developing improvements to existing networks. In this regard, wireless communication has become increasingly popular in recent years due, at least in part, to reductions in size and cost along with improvements in battery life and computing capacity of mobile electronic devices. As such, mobile electronic devices have become more capable, easier to use, and cheaper to obtain. Due to the now ubiquitous nature of mobile electronic devices, people of all ages and education levels are utilizing mobile terminals to communicate with other individuals or contacts, receive services and/or share information, media and other content.
Communication networks and technologies have been developed and expanded to provide robust support for mobile electronic devices. For example, the evolved universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) is also currently being developed. The E-UTRAN, which is also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) or 3.9G, is aimed at upgrading prior technologies by improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and providing better integration with other open standards. In a typical network configuration mobile users communicate with each other via communication links maintained by the network. In this regard, for example, an originating station may typically communicate data to network devices in order for the network devices to relay the data to a target station.
Recently, efforts have been made to enable the provision of closed subscriber groups (CSGs) to enable restricted access to particular CSG cells for particular groups of subscribers. CSGs may be useful for particular organizations or businesses that wish to define a group of users that may be enabled to freely access a base station, node or access point associated with the CSG, but may have restrictions for enabling access to the cell by individuals outside of the group. CSGs may also be useful in connection with individually established networks within private homes. In this regard, for example, a CSG may typically define a group of users (e.g., subscribers) that are enabled to access a particular CSG cell. As such, individuals that are not members of the group may not be able to access the CSG cell. In some situations, subscribers may be members of multiple CSGs. In practice, a CSG may be associated with one or more cells served by access points, base sites or node-Bs that may provide access to subscribers of the CSG.
Current communication standards enable a particular users mobile terminal or user equipment (UE) to discover possible CSG cells with which the UE may attempt to communicate using an autonomous search procedure. UEs may also manually attempt to communicate with CSG cells. The UE may then, if the attempt to communicate is successful, add the CSG or CSG identity to a “whitelist”. The whitelist may include a listing of the CSGs to which the UE knows it has access (e.g., either by prior manual access or the network providing the UE with the list by dedicated signaling). However, there is currently no provision for resolution of activities in response to the UE receiving a denial of access to a particular CSG.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide a mechanism for enabling improved control over the provision of CSG access.